Colonial Campaigns Club (CCC)

Headquarters, Sacketts Harbor

Gentlemen,

In a current game my Left Division suffered mightily under a well executed British assault and my men were put to flight. There is a problem....
During morale checks the routed companies (11 of them, gads) fail to rally and thus suffer further attrition. 11 Companies of 20 and 30 men suddenly dwindle to 1 single man!!! Shocking or usual? I asked my opponents and they quoted (correctly):
"If a Routed unit fails the Morale Check, it stays Routed, but also loses a number of men based on the amount the Die Roll exceeds the Morale, times 25 for Infantry and Cavalry, which is reported as lost stragglers".

To me this seems overly high since the US companies may actually start with less than this number and even the Brits may have only 30-60 men in a company. So, I compared this straggler formula to the formula in the HPS Napoleonic series where our units are battalions of 300-700 men. Sure enough, the user manual indicates that the same formula at x 25 is used to attrit for stragglers. This is a problem if the War of 1812 companies are suffering attrition equal to Napoleonic brigades.

I remain,

Captain Steve Davenport
Dept of 1812, commanding

Steve and his blues lost 250 men / 100 pts on
this Great Straggler Skedaddle. We're playing
with rout limiting off, but that being said
it still seems a tad harsh to say the least.

He has a good point.

I had never noticed that it used the same forumla, though I had long since noticed that mass straggle-routs were a major issue in this game, as opposed to the others.

Al, Rich? is this something that needs to be looked at? I've seen battles turn on a single mass straggle on more than one occasion.

Just thinking out loud here.

It sounds like John has his formula set for 1 stacking point, which is set at 25 men.

IF that is true then in the pdt file the stacking point number could be altered to take care of that problem. Although changing that would also change the way the game tracks victory points, Artillery melee and possibly some other mchanisms.

IF the 25 man thing is 'hard-coded' then only John could fix it.

A little tinkering with the pdt file would lets us know which way it is, and what other things might be altered as well. If it solved the problem without creating any new ones then an offical pdt file change and release would need to be done, but that isn't all too difficult to do.

That does explain why I notice the straggler effect in these games more. I hadn't given too much thought as to why the numbers were so high, before, but it makes sense. Thanks for pointing this out Steve. [;)]

Steve,

One way to prevent such huge losses is to remove those units from LOS and also break them up in to cells of 2 or 3 units. That way a second chain reaction can be avoided. The only time I have seen huge routs, and then subsequent huge losses from lost stragglers is when the units were left in large groups and in the line of fire.

Rich,
Sometimes you can't avoid it. For example, I saw it at Fort Stanwix, when the fort defenders lost about 1/3 of their strength that way, because with the fort being only 7 hexes sum told, there is no way to hide the troops that well, at best you can put routers in the center hex, still adjacent to the wall defenders, and if one of the guys on the wall routs, forcing a morale check into the center....

I've also seen something similiar with the indians on the British side at Chippewa, where the ability of routed units to move only one hex in the woods pinned them too close to onrushing US troops.

Rich and Al,

Thanks for taking a look at this. Actually, in this situation my companies were stacked no more than two per hex until they routed. As they routed I gathered them together out of LOS and within the command ranges of the organization. None of the units suffering this huge straggler attrition was within LOS.

I suspect that what needs to happen here is the attrition modifier be reduced from x25 to x2.5 for the Early Wars engine; it looks like it just didn't get changed from the Nappy engine.

I remain,
Captain Steve Davenport
Dept of 1812, commanding